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Evernote and Lexmark SmartSolution Printers

As a person that lives and breathes tech, it’s not often that I get surprised by a device—certainly, not by an all-in-one printer. But then, the Lexmark SmartSolution printers are different from any that I’ve encountered. Just as Eye-Fi elevated SD cards and changed digital cameras, Lexmark is changing the way we interact with our printers by making them more versatile, smarter, and easier to use. Plus, they now work amazingly well with Evernote.

A printer with Wi-Fi, touch screen, and apps?

The Lexmark SmartSolution All-in-One printers combine a bunch of great innovations. For one, these printers can cut the cord, bypassing your computer entirely and sending scans directly to web over WiFi. What’s more, these savvy machines can be loaded with apps. So, with one tap of the touch screen, you can send those documents, papers and receipts to that big shiny elephant in the cloud.

Evernote SmartSolution

Lexmark developed the Scan to Evernote SmartSolution to let you easily send those scans right into your Evernote accounts over WiFi with a single tap. Installation is as simple as getting an app on your phone; you just choose Evernote from the Lexmark SmartSolutions site, go through a quick setup, and within seconds your printer has it. That’s it. Then, as with everything you put into Evernote, those scans will instantly become accessible from any phone or computer you use.

As a special bonus, if you happen to live or work with other Evernote users, you can load separate Evernote SmartSolutions for each person. This way, everyone has their own app for their own account.

Or, you can keep it old school

We really like this new web-enabled Evernote SmartSolution, but you can always choose to scan to your computer instead, and then bring the files into Evernote manually.

Learn more

The Evernote SmartSolution is available for the Lexmark Interact S605, Prestige Pro805 and Platinum Pro905 printers. Check out Lexmark’s SmartSolution blog for more information on the integration and these new devices. While you’re at it, why not order one for yourself.

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This is a really slick solution, my compliments. Unfortunately I am the owner of a not so great (in terms of UI) MFP produced by Oki (C3530 MFP). While the hardware is really nice, the UI and software of the device is a nightmare.

Even the automated emailing into evernote does not work for me, since the printer can not handle the (required) secured connection to my SMTP.

One great way to enable direct evernote access for mid- to highend MFPs would be to open a “FTP in” connection on Evernotes Server, since most MFPs (Oki, Xerox, etc) support FTP as a DMS protocol… keep us posted in case Evernote is looking into that option…

I’ve been mulling over the purchase of an MFP for months… this is the impetus for me to go ahead and buy one, and it will be a Lexmark precisely because of this feature. (In fact, I emailed Evernote a couple weeks ago asking for exactly this… they told me to stay tuned. Thanks!)

With the iPad coming out and Evernote’s pledge to support it, I think this direct-to-Evernote scanning ability may allow home users to consider ditching a dedicated home PC.

To the previous commenter and owners of other MFPs/ scanners with email capability… a suggestion is that you can email a scan to the email address that gets set up if you have an Evernote pro account.

Brilliant! I love it for being able to scan my kid’s paintings directly into evernote with just one touch. No more carrying around all her paintings from her pre-school.. I just bring them home and with a single touch upload everything into Evernote. Someday I plan to make a collage out of these drawings and show it to her when she’s grown up.

I just paid $200 for a printer 4 months ago and it no longer works. I so need this printer. I can’t afford another one. The one I have isn’t Lexmark.I would like to try out a Lexmark brand printer. I heard about them but have never had one. This would be great way to try one out.

These printers are the BEST!!! With the iPad coming out and Evernote’s pledge to support it, I think this direct-to-Evernote scanning ability may allow home users to consider ditching a dedicated home PC.

I bought this printer recently mainly to be able to seamlessly work with my Evernote account and to be able to scan directly into Evernote. I have to say I am extremely disappointed. I set up everything and the printer keeps saying “email transmission error”. I contacted Lexmark and they were unable to help me or rectify the problem. I will be returning the printer as the “Scan to Evernote” function does not work.

I purchased the Lexmark Prestige Pro805 printer for my family (mainly for my wife), and the Evernote integration was what got me to look at this printer in the first place (and the 1 penny per page Black/White printing for the 2 higher priced models totally sold me on it).

Setup was very lengthy and complicated. I could not get Gmail (Google Apps version) to function as the ISP but was able to get Comcast setup as ISP easily. Comcast has a 10MB limit on email attachments – I found this out when the printer hung if I tried to send an 8.5 x 11 600DPI JPG which was exceeds 10MB in size.

After spending hours of setting up (including over 2 hours with tech support to resolve a minor manufacturing defect), the printer now works well in most ways. But, if you’re getting this specifically for Evernote, you should know up front that:

1) The Evernote smartsolution is actually less functional than the generic Email smartsolution, because it doesn’t allow specifying the subject (which helps if you want to use # or @ in subject line). The only thing that the Evernote smartsolution gets you over the regular Email smartsolution is the Evernote icon. In other words – no Evernote integration was ever needed – you just set up a “Scan to Email” smartsolution with your Evernote email address. “Scan to Email” is by far the best smartsolution and the killer feature that makes this platform interesting at the moment.

2) OCR is not yet integrated into a smartsolution that allows you to email directly to Evernote with the touch of a button. There IS a way to do OCR and then get it to Evernote but it involves multiple steps currently:

a) You must first load the OCR software from the included CD onto your Windows machine (or buy OCR software if you have a Mac).
b) set up a smartsolution for “Scan to PDF.” You’ll need to specify a folder location on a machine that has OCR software installed.
c) Set up Evernote to automatically import files that show up in this folder.
d) When your computer (with OCR software) is on, you can now scan to PDF (with searchable text) with the touch of a button – and it will end up in the directory you specified. Assuming you properly set up Evernote import, it will pull in the PDF file.

3) There is another way to do OCR scans but it involves multiple button presses and also gives you the flexibility to specify the file type – PDF, RTF, TXT, or XLS.

The Lexmark idea is a very good one, but the current implementation involves a lot of setup complication – both for smartsolutions and for the printer itself (delicate printhead/cartridge installation). As Lexmark rolls out additional smartsolutions, some of the things I described above should become easier to set up and customize.

I bought the Lexmark Prestige for the Evernote app. Last weekend I scanned and transmitted all my important documents. It was really easy to set up (follow the instructions carefully), and works a treat. The only thing I would like is the ability to make a couple of more choices before scanning. I would like to be able to specify the pdf OR jpg format and I would like a more logical naming of the scanned pdf (they are all named Scan0001.pdf) I can’t seem to figure out how to rename them either before or after scanning. After scanning I go to Evernote to name the note and apply the tags. The scanned pdfs are easily searchable, however.

(Love the podcast.) Got v. interested in these Lexmark devices on hearing this podcast. Just for anyone else who is looking into them and is interested in duplex scanning, these Lexmark devices are only capable of duplex scanning if you manually re-load the paper into the automatic sheet feeder a second time… it sounds from the information I’ve been able to find like it will actually correctly re-assemble the resulting PDF in terms of page order if you scan all of Side A and then all of Side B for a longer document, but still, hardly convenient if double-sided scanning matters to you. This was a deal-breaker for me—I would likely have ordered the top of the range model tonight if not for this issue…

What about the newer Lexmark models “Pinnacle Pro901″ and the “Platinum Pro905″? These both seem to have the touchscreen UI, and I would think they are generational refreshes of the models discussed here. I’m very interested in getting an all-in-one solution to ease the scanning of a couple hundred sheets of old bills and such. Can anyone shed some light on whether these new models are integrated with Evernote?

What is the SMTP server address in order to get the “Scan to Evernote” function to work? I’ve successfully added it to my S605 MFP but when I push the button, the screen says that my email has not been set up yet. When I enter my evernote account email address, the printer then asks for the SMTP server name?

Hey guys, I am having the same problem. Scan to evernote in lexmark printer is asking for email address, server, smtp, wharever, but I just mentioned it before in the smartsolutions app in the smartsolutions web. Can anyone help-me? thanks in advance for your help.

I also have exactly the same “email transmission error”problem. It happened only sometimes on a previous 905 printer (this is my second because the first one just fell apart) but this printer suddenly stopped sending emails at all. If anyone has figured out how to solve it, I’d be grateful. I think this is the last straw.

Since the printer has a five-year warranty, I’m told they will simply give you a store credit after your third issue. This is now my third issue, as tech support sent me an 805 by mistake. I must say, this has been a really frustrating experience. I’m ready to switch to a ScanSnap.

I had the same “email transmission error” on my pro 901. Worked fine for a year and then got the error. I use a gmail account to send from on the printer. I went into the smtp settings and changed my user name from xxxxxx to xxxxxx@gmail.com and changed the security to plain from nothing. Not sure which change fixed it. I use port 587 as outgoing. Works fine now.